The outrage over Disney’s recent closure of LucasArts is almost completely unwarranted. Sure, at one point the studio created amazing video games, but that was a long time ago.

LucasArts definitely holds an important place in video game history, but the studio/publisher hasn’t been very relevant for the last few years.

I spent a significant amount of time in the mid ’90s playing old school LucasArts point-and-click adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island (it’s still one of my favourite games ever), Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road.

Disney released the following statement regarding the closure of LucasArts:

After evaluating our position in the games market, we’ve decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company’s risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games. As a result of this change, we’ve had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles.

Remember Kinect Star Wars? I wish I didn’t. It was a horrible mess of broken motion controls. That pod racing video game was kind of amazing though.

I lost many hours to Knights of the Old Republic in high school.

LucasArt’s closure mainly affects two games: The promising gritty shooter, Star Wars 1313, and First Assault, a game that was never really officially announced in the first place. While great looking, I have a feeling 1313 wasn’t that far along in development, otherwise Disney probably wouldn’t have pulled the plug on its development so quickly.

Now that Disney owns the rights to popular old school adventure titles like Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, we might actually see sequels to these cult classics if the house of Mickey Mouse chooses to license them out to developers. In a perfect world, Schafer’s Double Fine or even Ron Gilbert, could potentially buy back the rights to create a new Monkey Island title (I would love this).

There are a lot of awesome characters in this image. Money Island’s LeChuck was a great evil enemy.

“Because I made them there. But now that they’re owned by someone else–that kind of sits weird with me. It’s like, ‘Well, if someone else is going to own Monkey Island, it should be me that owns Monkey Island,’ said Gilbert.

Another positive thing came out of LucasArts recent closure. Raven, the developers of Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy have released both titles’ source code, effectively allowing modders more control over the game.

Day of the Tentacle was one awesome point-and-click adventure game.

What some people might not realize is that Disney is actually behind Marvel’s recent film releases. Remember Avengers and how it actually was a really good movie? Well, Disney made that. Star Wars fans need to start putting some faith in Disney because I have a feeling they have a comprehensive vision in terms of the direction they want to take George Lucas’ beloved franchise.

What the LucasArts gamers are currently mourning actually died years ago and I have a feeling that this closure will actually turn out as a good thing for gamers, especially if we end up getting sequels to certain titles that gamers have been wanting for years.

It’s certainly sad that all of these individuals have lost their jobs.

So brush away those tears because this could be the beginning of a really cool retro adventure game resurgence. Only if Disney handles this correctly of course.